#785 Why Do Determinists Say the Self is an Illusion?

Dr. craig’s response

It is not their determinism that leads some people to deny the reality of consciousness, Casey, but rather their underlying assumption of materialism or physicalism. They think that every concrete object is a physical object; there are no immaterial substances and, hence, no souls or minds. Therefore everything you do is determined by physical causes. Determinism is the consequence of physicalism.

But it’s important to understand that not all physicalists hold that consciousness is an illusion.

There two types of physicalism on offer today.  First is reductive or eliminative physicalism. As the name suggests, proponents of this view do try to eliminate consciousness altogether. They deny, incredibly, that we even have mental states at all. The people that you’ve run into are evidently reductive physicalists.

Second, there is non-reductive physicalism – the view that the brain gives rise to supervenient or epiphenomenal states of awareness like jubilance or sadness or pain. But there is not any thing – any soul or mind – that has these experiences. Rather, the brain is the only thing that really exists, and these mental states are just states belonging to the brain.

What you need to understand is that reductive physicalism is increasingly unpopular today, even amongst physicalists. For reductive physicalism does not account well for our mental lives, since the brain, as a physical substance, has only physical properties, such as a certain volume, a certain mass, a certain density, a certain location, a certain shape. But the brain on this view does not have mental properties. The brain is not jubilant, the brain is not sad, the brain is not in pain, even though the brain is involved in the neural circuitry that gives us such experiences. One cannot reduce fear, for example, to a physical brain state even if it is correlated with such a brain state. So reductive physicalism seems obviously untenable. It cannot be reconciled with our mental experience. Lest the reductive physicalist retort that such experiences are just illusory, then he finds himself caught in a self-defeating position. For an illusion is itself a mental state! But on this view mental states do not exist. Therefore there is no illusion of consciousness.

So the real debate today is between non-reductive physicalism and some sort of dualism-interactionism. Philosopher of mind Angus Menuge mentions several problems confronting a materialist or physicalist philosophy of mind:

Reductive and eliminative forms of physicalism fail to account for our mental lives. But . . . the varieties of non-reductive physicalism also fail to account for mental causation. If these [non-reductive] theories are faithful to physicalism, then supervening or emergent mental properties cannot add anything new that was not going to happen anyway, as a result of their physical base properties. If we want to account for consciousness, mental causation, and reasoning, we need some entity over and above the body. This entity must be simple, have thoughts as inseparable parts, persist as a unity over time, and have active power. That sounds like a soul.[1]

For an in-depth exploration of the problems of non-reductive physicalism I refer you to the discussion of the mind-body problem by my colleague J. P. Moreland in our book Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 2d ed. (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP, 2017). For a more succinct and simpler account see my recent In Quest of the Historical Adam (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans 2021), pp. 370-76.